Download or read book Marriage in Seventeenth-Century English Political Thought written by Belinda Roberts Peters and published by Springer. This book was released on 2004-09-08 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study traces the decline of marriage as a metaphor for political authority, subjection, and tyranny in Seventeenth-century political thought. An image that bound consent and contract with divine right absolutism, and irrevocably connected royal prerogatives with subjects' liberties, its disappearance in the middle decades of the century coincided with the full emergence of patriarchalist and social contract theories. If both these accepted the importance of 'fathers of families', neither would suggest that political government could be comparable to 'marriage'.